Many different types of speech related applications, such as speech synthesis (or text-to-speech) and speech recognition, have capabilities for predicting the pronunciations of out-of-vocabulary words. This is normally accomplished using letter-to-sound (LTS) components.
LTS components are commonly used to pronounce personal names, location names, product names, and other such items, often referred to as named entities. The LTS components are commonly used to pronounce named entities, because named entities are often not contained in the vocabulary of the speech related application.
Personal names and other named entities often originate from a wide variety of different languages. Each of these languages often has its own set of pronunciation rules for pronouncing such words. Therefore, the accuracy of the pronunciation generated from a typical English LTS component is normally low for words that originated in another language.
Therefore, identifying the language of origin of a personal name or other word or named entity, without context, is currently being used in an attempt to aid speech synthesis, speech recognition and named entity transliteration. Identifying the language of origin is currently being performed using morphological structure, which has long been considered as the main source of language origin information. However, the error rate associated with current language of origin identifiers is still appreciable.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.